"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." --verbal kint, the usual suspects (paraphrasing baudelaire, apparently) we

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." --verbal kint, the usual suspects (paraphrasing baudelaire, apparently) wealth worship (underlying certain strains of capitalism, but not all) relies on an economic misdirection that disassociates people's labor from money (and therefore wealth) and instead associates money/wealth with things. this way, we don't feel nearly as bad when a person accumulates wealth, because it's just things they're accumulating. but really, they're accumulating (the value created by people through their) labor. for example, you could say that gold is intrinsically valuable, but that value derives from our desire to put it to use (via human labor) and its relative scarcity. if a person never unlocks that value with their labor by digging the gold up, then it effectively has no value. so we should remember that money represents someone's labor (in many cases, it just represents our own labor). accumulating money is accumulating people's labor. (with enough force behind the this, and it becomes slavery.) that isn't to argue entirely against wealth. some people (but not as many as the wealth disparity might indicate) are truly capable of being more productive with our labor than we ourselves can be. it's reasonable to let them accumulate some of that additional production unlocked by their labor investing in us. it's why we look to, and follow, leaders. (tangentially, this is why legacy wealth through inheritance is generally a net negative because it's almost never as productive as it initially was.) but underlying a stable social structure is a delicate balance between our own freedom to apply our labor to create value and giving up some freedom by lending our labor to others. wealth disparity increasingly takes away that choice. backing people into a corner is dangerous indeed.